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On Mon, 29 Nov 2004, Andrew Brown wrote:

>>Eh?  From $PATH to $EDITOR to $TERM, lot's of programs alter their 
>>behavior based on environment variables.
>
>that's a silly argument.  :)
>
>*lots* of programs use $PATH and and $EDITOR (or $VISUAL -- why are
>there two?) or $TERM, but only cpp will use your CPP_RESTRICTED
>variable.

VISUAL and EDITOR are both around because historically programs will try 
to use VISUAL, and fall back to EDITOR if running on a dumb terminal.  
Of course dumb terminals are pretty rare these days.  :-)

More generally, it remains the case that lots of programs use 
environment variables to cause a change in behavior -- even environment 
variables (such as EXRC) which are only used by a single program or by 
two closely related programs.

cpp(1) itself has other variables which only it uses within our system.  
The larger point here is that neither way is `more' unix-like.  As to 
which way is better in this case, I've made my arguments on that matter 
elsewhere in this thread, but I'm not particularly wedded to them.  :-)

- -- 
				Jim Wise
				jwise@draga.com
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